Yield potential maps can help project managers decide which fields are well-suited for their experimental trials, or on which part of a particular field to focus their trial. These maps are derived from annual patterns of vegetation growth, and can help identify spatial patterns in fields that could have an impact on crop growth.
Generating YPMs in openEO
Yield potential maps be generated through the openEO service available on the Terrascope EOPlaza platform. Through this service, users get a limited number of free credits in order to process jobs (such as creating YPMs). These credits are replenished monthly, however they can be exhausted by multiple requests. To learn more about this credit system, see the Terrascope Pricing page. After creating an account with free credits, you can continue with generating YPMs:
- to use the openEO Web Editor, you need to use the EGI Check-in authentication method. Therefore, when signing in to the EOPlaza, you should use the EduGAIN & social logins button
- in the catalogue, search 'Yield Potential Map' and find the correct application. Press ACCESS SERVICE to get redirected to the openEO website
- sign in to openEO using EGI Check-in with your institutional/social login information
- once signed in, you can use the Process Wizard to generate YPMs
- select the start time and end time (a full year or growing season is recommended for best results)
- add a Polygon feature by either a) dragging and dropping a kml or geojson file containing the polygon coordinates, or b) drawing a polygon in the area of interest using the interactive viewer (below)
- you can also select additional options to augment the calculation of the yield potential map. For example, you can choose to exclude months or crop types (only in Belgium), and get the results in raw or categorized format
- click Next and select the Batch Jobs bullet point. Provide a specific title for your batch job.
- click Create and wait for your batch job to be requested, running, and finished
- once the job is finished, you can download it via the download icon and the orange DOWNLOAD AS GEOTIFF IMAGE
- with the image downloaded, you can review the results in any TIFF image viewer such as QGIS. It is also recommended that you process and download results for multiple years separately in order to identify spatial patterns that persist over multiple years.
Note: it is possible that you will get an error 'Could not find any valid dates to process'. If this happens, try removing all months from the Exclude months option and/or setting the fAPAR threshold to 0.1 in the options before resubmitting the job.